And the crew of previous flight also recognized there was a trim problem, but in their case almost immediately disabled the automated trim and trimmed via the mechanical trim wheels.
That seemed quite logical to me, whether or not it was a classic presentation of runaway stabilizer, it must have at least appeared as an intermittent fault. From the memory items, auto trim isn't essential so, if it's making things worse instead of better, turn it off.
In hindsight, some mention of MCAS in the training material would have been a good idea, but... there's a lot of systems on a modern aircraft, it is unreasonable to expect pilots to have an intimate knowledge every single one of them and how a malfunction affects control. Would knowing of the existence of MCAS make a decisive difference over knowing that there are automated systems that alter trim and that can be turned off if they cause problems? Where Boeing really dropped the ball is in allowing MCAS to continue to mess with the trim when other systems
knew that the AoA data it was using was unreliable.